2018

From Richard Weikart at ENST|: In an article for Nautilus, Cristine Legare explains “Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory.” An associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, she laments that the social sciences are missing out, because they ignore the findings of evolutionary theory. She states, “The lack of willingness to view human cognition and behavior as within the purview of evolutionary processes has prevented evolution from being fully integrated into the social science curriculum.” … The emptiness of her approach is even more evident when she provides a concrete example to illustrate her point that “Applying evolutionary theory to social science has the potential to transform education and, through it, society.” The example she proffers is Read More ›

From Phoebe Southworth at the Daily Mail: Scientists have found ‘strong evidence’ that dogs use gestures to communicate with people in one of the first systematic attempts to decode their language. … Sometimes dogs use a variety of signals in order to get their message across if it is not understood the first time, the study showed. And different dogs were found to use different signals for the same request. Amazing. Simply amazing. It appears that most of the time the object of interest is their food bowl. More. What’s more, there is anecdotal evidence that some dogs will even bring the food bowl, the water bowl, the leash, or the ball to their human friends, in case anyone forgot the Read More ›

From Steve Laufmann at ENST, on Nathan Lents’s book  Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.  As a systems architect, I’ve spent decades designing and implementing large and complex systems of information systems — often involving thousands of individual systems. Such systems are normally embedded in complex processes that may span days, months, or even years. They integrate information systems with human activities, often across multiple organizations. These systems have a lot of moving parts. It turns out that a number of key design principles are essential for building and modifying complex systems of systems. Get the design principles right, and everything works better. Mess up the design principles, and everything is harder — and Read More ›

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you do know that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain According to the overrated philosopher, David Hume, we should not try to draw logical conclusions about objective morality based on our knowledge of the real world. This was his smug way of claiming that humans are incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Through the years, his devoted followers have tweaked his message into a flat out declaration: We cannot derive an “ought to” (a moral code) from the “is.” (the way things are). Just to make sure that we don’t misunderstand, they characterize this formulation as “Hume’s Law.” The only problem with this philosophy Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: Scientists have a common saying about models: “Garbage in, garbage out.” That means if you put bad data into a model, you can fully expect for the model to spit out bad conclusions. The same is true for organizations. If a newspaper hires improperly educated, hyperpartisan people who possess merely a casual relationship with the truth, we can fully expect the newspaper to produce absolute rubbish. And that’s exactly what has happened at the New York Times. Consider the following: – Just two days ago, a piece in Slate criticized the NYT for its coverage of topics like “wellness” and “detox.” The NYT has entire pages dedicated to these wishy-washy Read More ›

  From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, reviewing Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Forbes: The history of physics is filled with great ideas that you’ve heard of, like the Standard Model, the Big Bang, General Relativity, and so on. But it’s also filled with brilliant ideas that you probably haven’t heard of, like the Sakata Model, Technicolor theory, the Steady State Model, and Plasma Cosmology. Today, we have theories that are highly fashionable, but without any evidence for them: supersymmetry, grand unification, string theory, and the multiverse. … Yet unlike in the past, these dead-ends continue to represent the fields in which the leading theorists and experimentalists cluster to investigate. These blind alleys, which have Read More ›

Mechanobiology is an engineer’s vision of the cell: How do forces and mechanisms in cells and tissues contribute to cell development, differentiation, function, and deterioration (disease). From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: The mechanobiology field actually goes by assorted names, among them: soft matter, the new condensed matter physics, morphomechanics, morphometrics, biomechanics, biophysics, mathematical biology (partial list), and importantly integrates life across the board: animals, plants, fungi, microbes—which has to include viruses. It also encompasses materials science. So you can put active matter under the mechanobiology umbrella (but without Lee Cronin’s “Alien chemist“). When I say mechanobiology is all the rage, I’m not simply referring to lab research and scientific conferences on the subject, although they are, of course, central. But Read More ›

From Jay Richards at ENST: On a new episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards talks with host Mike Keas about a recent Atlantic article from former National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger on “How the Enlightenment Ends” with the rise of artificial intelligence. Richards … explains that AI is about statistical processing, not budding consciousness; and the ethical concerns it raises are both important yet in some ways not so new. More. Podcast: Jay Richards is the author of a forthcoming book (June 19), The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. In other news, Chicken Little is said to be having a nervous breakdown over his advance copy.  It is wrecking the  a-shock-alypse industry. Read More ›

While we are talking about the Bible anyway… What would our ancestors have made of news of the dinosaurs? The dinosaurs made no impact on human life to which a religious teacher could point, then or now. The animals discussed in the Bible are known to the hearers; their habits are familiar and therefore useful as illustrations: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. So far as we know to this day, ants don’t have a “ruler” in the human sense; the queen lays the eggs that keep the colony going. They seem to Read More ›

It’s risky. The church splitter (fundamentalism) vs. the church closer (theistic evolution). William Lane Craig writes: Two challenges to this doctrine arise from modern science, one fairly old and the other very recent. … I am currently exploring the genetic evidence that is said to rule out an original pair of modern humans. In talking with genetic scientists, I’ve found that there is enormous confusion about this question today. Popularizers have misrepresented the arguments, thereby inviting misguided responses. The issues are very technical and difficult to understand. I’m just beginning to get my feet wet and don’t want to misrepresent the science. I want to know how firm the evidence is and what it would cost intellectually to maintain the Read More ›

Further to a recent call for evolutionary psychologists to study atheism, from Caroline McCarthy, a Silicon Valley veteran, at Vox, writes about receiving an invite to a tech entrepreneur event: “We are bringing together the sacred plant medicine ayahuasca with leaders at the world’s most innovative startups,” the email said. “Together we will go on a journey to deeply explore our individual and collective purpose.” They were not kidding. Half of tech workers identified as atheist or agnostic, according to a survey by the Lincoln Network, an organization dedicated to advancing principles of economic conservatism in the tech industry. That’s compared to just 7 percent of the US population who identify as atheist or agnostic (although an additional 16 percent Read More ›

From Joseph R. Miller at More than Cake: Fine Tuning has certainly advanced over the centuries, but still it is worth noting that one of the early and oft quoted critics was philosopher David Hume. However, his reasoning was fatally flawed and in a previous post I give four reasons to reject Hume’s criticism: First, Hume’s assumption that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is itself a non-scientific assertion. Second, Hume’s claim that science disproves a supernatural cause for nature is flawed in that he assumes the conclusion in the premise. Third, Hume’s argument against the testimony of those who have faith is rooted, at best, in prejudice and, at worst, outright racism—not reason. Fourth, Hume’s threshold for validating the teleological Read More ›

Or does he get a pass because he is pop culture squared? Or (hold your breath) does progressivism make people stupid as well as unpleasant? From Philip Ball at the Guardian: The row over racist remarks made by Einstein says more about the pedestals we put great scientists on than the man himself Was Albert Einstein racist? In pondering the disobliging remarks he made about Chinese and Japanese people in the private diaries he kept about his travels to east Asia in 1922-3, just published by Princeton University Press, it’s not a particularly helpful question. On the one hand, there’s the view that even this famously humane and broadminded scientist was inevitably a man of his time. Accordingly, we can’t Read More ›

ID proponents have many times noted that at BioLogos, both management figures and columnists have distorted and deformed the facts about ID theory and the Discovery Institute.  But perhaps even more damaging to the accurate public perception of ID are the comments which fill the BioLogos discussion boards.  The negative comments about ID coming from BioLogos readers are not only more numerous than those which appear in actual BioLogos articles, but also more unrestrained and extreme, and generally speaking (because the BioLogos boards are frequented overwhelmingly by people who are anti-ID), they go unchallenged.  I here discuss a recent case, from this BioLogos page: I will focus on this passage from one “Ronald_Myers”: One thing Gauger does not address is Read More ›

Further to Why we should trust “science,” whatever that is, from a long form article by Rebecca Trager at Chemistry World: Concerns about forensic science have lurked for some time. Major science advisory bodies in the US and UK had warned about deficiencies in the field that require action. In 2013, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) initiated a study, known as Mix13, which involved more than 100 crime labs analysing the same DNA mixtures in five mock cases. The complexity of the mixture increased in each case, and in the final case, which was the most complex, about 70% of those labs falsely included a DNA profile that was not actually in the mixture. Nist has Read More ›